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As I was talking to one of my friends, I said this sentence.

We will need two of it.

I said it looking at the only glass cup I had. I was preparing for the party.

Two of it struck me as extremely wrong. But I knew that I couldn't say "two of these" as there was only one cup in the whole house.

I searched for similar texts but attained no satisfactory results.

I think "two more of it" or "two more of that" is better sounding, but not so sure as to the gramar aspect of it.

Is it grammatical to say "two of it" or "two more of it"?

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  • I think you meant "...I heard this sentence." Anyway, are you looking for "We will need two of them"? Two is OK because it is what you need, not what you have. You could use these, but properly it should modify a noun, like "We will need two of these glasses."
    – user3169
    Commented Jul 16, 2016 at 21:07
  • @user3169 So never two of singular? Always two of plural? I thought when I say two of these glasses, it implies that there are more than two glasses and I need only two of those, as opposed to the situation in which I had only one such glass cup.
    – whitedevil
    Commented Jul 16, 2016 at 21:18
  • It could mean as you say "there are more than two glasses and I need only two of those". However, with "I need" the one glass is only an example of the kind of object you need. You may or may not have what you "need". If I say "I need a million dollars." it is a good bet that I don't have that much money, right?
    – user3169
    Commented Jul 16, 2016 at 22:31
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    @whitedevil Right! It may be easier to understand if you think of the plurals them and these in your examples as referring to the set of all glasses. A native speaker would, in fact, have said "We will need two of these." Your knowledge of the actual number of cups in your particular house is not a factor. An English speaker might be more specific (and use "two of singular!") by using the phrase "We will need two of this cup," but "We will need two of these (cups)" is by far the most natural usage.
    – P. E. Dant Reinstate Monica
    Commented Jul 16, 2016 at 23:04
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    @whitedevil Well, I have searched Google books for "two of it" and "two of it -"or two". The second search eliminates instances of the idiomatic a xxxx or two of it, as in let me read a page or two of it, which is okay. There were a few instances at least one hundred years old like We went to the store to buy something we liked and we bought two of it, showing that it was considered okay by some people at some point in the past. Also, two (measure word) of it, as in two quarts of it is fine. So, yeah, I don't think it's ungrammatical, but unidiomatic.
    – Alan Carmack
    Commented Jul 21, 2016 at 17:26

2 Answers 2

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Your example of

I need two of it

sounds awkward, usually a native will simply say

I need two
I will need two

with surrounding context so that what is needed is understood.

If you are requesting from a large selection of something you might say

I need two of those
I need two of these
I need two of them

If you are requesting from a single example of something you might say

I need two of this (while holding an example of what it is you want)
I need two of that (while pointing to an example of what it is you want)

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One way around your difficulty is a slightly different construction:

I need two like this.

Or

I need two more like this one.

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